Water 'rights' wrong way to regard Delta

One of the fundamental aspects of life in the northern San Joaquin Valley is bad water. The Valley is an inland sea of bad water. And water laws subverted.

Michael Fitzgerald

One of the fundamental aspects of life in the northern San Joaquin Valley is bad water. The Valley is an inland sea of bad water. And water laws subverted.

Stocktonians look at this travesty through their cultural lenses: politically, legally and environmentally. The perspective, for instance, of Dante Nomellini, a water attorney, who gave a good talk Wednesday night on the peripheral canal.

The other speaker on the program was a surprise: Mark Franco, an American Indian, a leader of the Winnemem Wintu tribe of the lower McCloud River, near Redding.

The Winnemem are locked in a long-running fight with the state of California over Shasta Dam, flooding of the lower McCloud and sacred sites.

Franco's fresh take on the peripheral canal, on the dams proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and on water in general arises from a world view radically different from the European. But his spiritual view meshed with Nomellini's legal analysis.

"They look at water as a commodity to be bought and sold - water 'rights,' not water responsibility," Franco said of big Delta water users, "with no regard for the place that may be left dry."

That is certainly true. Only Thursday, a publication called Voice of San Diego said the Delta, 450 miles away, is "far enough away that it can seem like little more than a notion, a foreign place."

This followed a piece Wednesday by journalist Dan Bacher, who nailed the governor's mind-set: "In Schwarzenegger's mind, the Delta is not an ecosystem that provides water supply, but a water supply that happens to include an ecosystem."

The way Franco sees it, humans are not disconnected from the natural world, they are the natural world. They must respect it as they respect themselves.

"We have a responsibility to the water," he said. "It is a living being; ... it runs through the Delta like it flows through your body."

On dams: "If I was to build a dam in your body, which part of your body would you be willing to give up? A dam is like a tourniquet."

And a peripheral canal is like a "cardiac bypass." "How's that going to help your heart?" Franco asked - or help the Delta, the heart of California water?

"You hear that the Delta can't be fixed," Franco said. "That may be true. It may be that the water systems of the world may be tired of us ... because we're not respecting them."

The Winnemem declared war on the state in 2004, nominally if nonviolently, landing Franco, their war chief, on the Department of Homeland Security watch list.

Some of this probably sounds wacky - until it is remembered that California's first people lived in perfect balance with the Delta for perhaps 10,000 years.

And in a mere 160 years, our "rational" culture has managed to degrade the San Joaquin River into a fetid colon and push the Delta to the edge of collapse.

Franco's talk suggests a different aspect of bad water. It suggests a reason why youths are angry, adults sullen or disaffected, the city stigmatized: the natural environment is degraded, water discounted as a commodity, as mere fuel for growth and industry. Ugliness reigns.

Such a crazy state of affairs - seeing the Delta as little more than a rudimentary canal, an earthen ditch to be improved upon by a better engineered conveyance - is, unfortunately, a base-line Valley experience. Degradation 101, attendance mandatory.

The proper response is to join Franco in the fight.

Nomellini, a savvy veteran of water wars, drew the battle lines at the peripheral canal, or any "conveyance" that isolates southbound water from the Delta at large.

State history shows any promises of environmental protection or NorCal water rights will be broken. The governor's emergency powers will preclude any legal remedy, Nomellini warned.

If exporters can take water without regard for the Delta, they will leave the waterways to crumble into a choppy, brackish afterthought of a lake. Tying them to the "common pool" cements their responsibilities as well as rights, Nomellini argued.

He's on the warpath, too. "It is," he said, "the purest form of a water grab that I've seen since I've been in the practice of law."